A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller)

Bantam Books by Walter M. Miller, Jr. A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ SAINT LEIBOWITZ AND THE WILD HORSE WOMAN

This edition contains the complete text of the original paperback edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED. A Canticle for Leibowitz A Bantam Spectra Book published by arrangement with the author PUBLISHING HISTORY Lippincott edition published October 1959 Bantam rack edition published February 1961 Bantam trade paperback edition / October 1997 SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1959 by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Cover art copyright © 1976 by Peter Jones. BOOK DESIGN BY GLEN M. EDELSTEIN Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-26925 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books. ISBN 0-553-37926-7 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENT The Darfsteller Copyright © 1955 by Walter M. Miller, Jr. first published in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1955

a dedication is only a scratch where it itches— for ANNE, then in whose bosom RACHEL lies muselike guiding my clumsy song and giggling between the lines —with blessings, Lass W

ACKNOWLEDGMENT To all those whose assistance, in various ways, contributed to making this book possible, the author expresses his appreciation and gratitude, especially and explicitly to the following: Mr. and Mrs. W. M. Miller, Sr., Messrs. Don Congdon, Anthony Boucher, and Alan Williams, to Dr. Marshal Taxay, the Reverend Alvin Burggraff, C.S.P., to Ss Francis and Clare, and to Mary, for reasons known to each of them.

CONTENTS PART I Fiat Homo PART II Fiat Lux PART III Fiat Voluntas Tua BONUS STORY The Darfsteller

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ

FIAT HOMO

1 Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert. Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim’s advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat. Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an Ave or two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun. Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way. Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the Cyclopean, patron of the misborn, for protection against the Saint’s unhappy protégés. (For who did not then know that there were monsters in the earth in those days? That which was born alive was, by the law of the Church and the law of Nature, suffered to live, and helped to maturity if possible, by those who had begotten it. The law was not always obeyed, but it was obeyed with sufficient frequency to sustain a scattered population of adult monsters, who often chose the remotest of deserted lands for their wanderings, where they prowled by night around the fires of prairie travelers.) But at last the iota

squirmed its way out of the heat risers and into clear air, where it manifestly became a distant pilgrim; Brother Francis released the crucifix with a small Amen. The pilgrim was a spindly old fellow with a staff, a basket hat, a brushy beard, and a waterskin slung over one shoulder. He was chewing and spitting with too much relish to be an apparition, and he seemed too frail and lame to be a successful practitioner of ogre-ism or highwaymanship. Nevertheless, Francis slunk quietly out of the pilgrim’s line of sight and crouched behind a heap of rubbled stone where he could watch without being seen. Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike. Seldom more than thrice annually did any layman or stranger travel the old road that passed the abbey, in spite of the oasis which permitted that abbey’s existence and which would have made the monastery a natural inn for wayfarers if the road were not a road from nowhere, leading nowhere, in terms of the modes of travel in those times. Perhaps, in earlier ages, the road had been a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso; south of the abbey it intersected a similar strip of broken stone that stretched east- and westward. The crossing was worn by time, but not by Man, of late. The pilgrim approached within hailing distance, but the novice stayed behind his mound of rubble. The pilgrim’s loins were truly girded with a piece of dirty burlap, his only clothing except for hat and sandals. Doggedly he plodded ahead with a mechanical limp while assisting his crippled leg with the heavy staff. His rhythmic gait was that of a man with a long road behind him and a long way yet to go. But, upon entering the area of the ancient ruins, he broke his stride and paused to reconnoiter. Francis ducked low. There was no shade amid the cluster of mounds where a group of ageold buildings once had been, but some of the larger stones could, nevertheless, provide cooling refreshment to select portions of the anatomy for travelers as wise in the way of the desert as the pilgrim soon proved himself to be. He searched briefly for a rock of suitable proportions. Approvingly, Brother Francis noted that he did not grasp the stone and rashly tug, but instead, stood at a safe distance from it and, using his staff as

a lever and a smaller rock for a fulcrum, he jostled the weightier one until the inevitable buzzing creature crawled forth from below. Dispassionately the traveler killed the snake with his staff and flipped the still wriggling carcass aside. Having dispatched the occupant of the cool cranny beneath the stone, the pilgrim availed himself of the cool cranny’s ceiling by the usual method of overturning the stone. Thereupon, he pulled up the back of his loincloth, sat with his withered buttocks against the stone’s relatively chilly underside, kicked off his sandals, and pressed the soles of his feet against what had been the sandy floor of the cool cranny. Thus refreshed, he wiggled his toes, smiled toothlessly and began to hum a tune. Soon he was singing a kind of crooning chant in a dialect not known to the novice. Weary of crouching, Brother Francis shifted restlessly. While he sang, the pilgrim unwrapped a biscuit and a bit of cheese. Then his singing paused, and he stood for a moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: “Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,” in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating. The Wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. The old man was making a penitential pilgrimage, hazarded Brother Francis—perhaps to the “shrine” at the abbey, although the “shrine” was not yet officially a shrine, nor was its “saint” yet officially a saint. Brother Francis could think of no alternate explanation of the presence of an old wanderer on this road leading to nowhere. The pilgrim was taking his time with the bread and cheese, and the novice grew increasingly restless as his own anxiety waned. The rule of silence for the Lenten fast days did not permit him to converse voluntarily with the old man, but if he left his hiding place behind the rubble heap before the old man departed, he was certain to be seen or heard by the pilgrim, for he had been forbidden to leave the vicinity of his hermitage before the end of Lent. Still slightly hesitant, Brother Francis loudly cleared his throat, then straightened into view. “Whup!”

The pilgrim’s bread and cheese went flying. The old man grabbed his staff and bounded to his feet. “Creep up on me, will you!” He brandished the staff menacingly at the hooded figure which had arisen from beyond the rock pile. Brother Francis noticed that the thick end of the staff was armed with a spike. The novice bowed courteously, thrice, but the pilgrim overlooked this nicety. “Stay back there now!” he croaked. “Just keep your distance, sport. I’ve got nothing you’re after—unless it’s the cheese, and you can have that. If it’s meat you want, I’m nothing but gristle, but I’ll fight to keep it. Back now! back!” “Wait—” The novice paused. Charity, or even common courtesy, could take precedence over the Lenten rule of silence, when circumstances demanded speech, but to break silence on his own decision always left him slightly nervous. “I’m not a sport, good simpleton,” he continued, using the polite address. He tossed hack his hood to show his monastic haircut and held up his rosary beads. “Do you understand these?” For several seconds the old man remained in catlike readiness for combat while he studied the novice’s sun-blistered, adolescent face. The pilgrim’s had been a natural mistake. Grotesque creatures who prowled the fringes of the desert often wore hoods, masks, or voluminous robes to hide deformity. Among them were these whose deformity was not limited to the body, those who sometimes looked on travelers as a dependable source of venison. After a brief scrutiny, the pilgrim straightened. “Oh—one of them.” He leaned on his staff and scowled. “Is that the Leibowitz Abbey down yonder?” he asked, pointing toward the distant cluster of buildings to the south. Brother Francis bowed politely and nodded at the ground. “What are you doing out here in the ruins?” The novice picked up a chalklike fragment of stone. That the traveler might be literate was statistically unlikely, but Brother Francis decided to try. Since the vulgar dialects of the people had neither alphabet nor orthography, he chalked the Latin words for “Penance, Solitude, and Silence,” on a large flat stone, and wrote them again below in ancient

English, hoping, in spite of his unacknowledged yearning for someone to talk to, that the old man would understand and leave him to his lonely Lenten vigil. The pilgrim smiled wryly at the inscription. His laugh seemed less a laugh than a fatalistic bleat. “Hmmm-hnnn! Still writing things backward,” he said; but if he understood the inscription, he did not condescend to admit it. He laid aside his staff, sat on the rock again, picked his bread and cheese out of the sand, and began scraping them clean. Francis moistened his lips hungrily, but looked away. He had eaten nothing but cactus fruit and one handful of parched corn since Ash Wednesday; the rules of fast and abstinence were rather strict for vocational vigils. Noticing his discomfort, the pilgrim broke his bread and cheese; he offered a portion to Brother Francis. In spite of his dehydrated condition, caused by his meager water supply, the novice’s mouth flooded with saliva. His eyes refused to move from the hand that offered the food. The universe contracted; at its exact geometric center floated that sandy tidbit of dark bread and pale cheese. A demon commanded the muscles of his left leg to move his left foot half a yard forward. The demon then possessed his right leg to move the right foot ahead of the left, and it somehow forced his right pectorals and biceps to swing his arm until his hand touched the hand of the pilgrim. His fingers felt the food; they seemed even to taste the food. An involuntary shudder passed over his half-starved body. He closed his eyes and saw the Lord Abbot glaring at him and brandishing a bullwhip. Whenever the novice tried to visualize the Holy Trinity, the countenance of God the Father always became confused with the face of the abbot, which was normally, it seemed to Francis, very angry. Behind the abbot a bonfire raged, and from the midst of the flames the eyes of the Blessed Martyr Leibowitz gazed in death-agony upon his fasting protégé, caught in the act of reaching for cheese. The novice shuddered again. “Apage Satanas!” he hissed as he danced back and dropped the food. Without warning, he spattered the old man with holy water from a tiny phial sneaked from his sleeve. The pilgrim had become indistinguishable from the Archenemy, for a moment, in the somewhat sun-dazed mind of the novice.

This surprise attack on the Powers of Darkness and Temptation produced no immediate supernatural results, but the natural results seemed to appear ex opere operato. The pilgrim-Beelzebub failed to explode into sulfurous smoke, but he made gargling sounds, turned a bright shade of red, and lunged at Francis with a bloodcurdling yell. The novice kept tripping on his tunic as he fled from flailing of the pilgrim’s spiked staff, and he escaped without nail holes only because the pilgrim had forgotten his sandals. The old man’s limping charge became a skippity hop. He seemed suddenly mindful of scorching rocks under his bare soles. He stopped and became preoccupied. When Brother Francis glanced over his shoulder, he gained the distinct impression that the pilgrim’s retreat to his cool spot was being accomplished by the feat of hopping along on the tip of one great toe. Ashamed of the odor of cheese that lingered on his fingertips, and repenting his irrational exorcism, the novice slunk back to his selfappointed labors in the old ruins, while the pilgrim cooled his feet and satisfied his wrath by flinging an occasional rock at the youth whenever the latter moved into view among the rubble mounds. When his arm at last grew weary, he flung more feints than stones, and merely grumbled over his bread and cheese when Francis ceased to dodge. The novice was wandering to and fro throughout the ruins, occasionally staggering toward some focal point of his work with a rock, the size of his own chest, locked in a painful embrace. The pilgrim watched him select a stone, estimate its dimensions in hand-spans, reject it, and carefully select another, to be pried free from the rock jam of the rubble, to be hoisted by Francis and stumblingly hauled away. He dropped one stone after a few paces, and, suddenly sitting, placed his head between his knees in an apparent effort to avoid fainting. After panting awhile, he arose again and finished by rolling the stone end-over-end toward its destination. He continued this activity while the pilgrim, no longer glaring, began to gape. The sun blazed its midday maledictions upon the parched land, laying its anathema on all moist things. Francis labored on in spite of the heat. When the traveler had washed down the last of his sandy bread and cheese with a few squirts from his waterskin, he slipped feet into sandals, arose with a grunt, and hobbled through the ruins toward the site of the novice’s labors. Noticing the old man’s approach, Brother Francis scurried to a safe distance. Mockingly, the pilgrim brandished his spiked cudgel at

him, but seemed more curious about the youth’s masonry than he seemed eager for revenge. He paused to inspect the novice’s burrow. There, near the east boundary of the ruins, Brother Francis had dug a shallow trench, using a stick for a hoe and hands for a shovel. He had, on the first day of Lent, roofed it over with a heap of brush, and used the trench by night as refuge from the desert’s wolves. But as the days of his fasting grew in number, his presence had increased his spoor in the vicinity until the nocturnal lupine prowlers seemed unduly attracted to the area of the ruins and even scratched around his brush heap when the fire was gone. Francis had first attempted to discourage their nightly digging by increasing the thickness of the brush pile over his trench, and by surrounding it with a ring of stones set tightly in a furrow. But on the previous night, something had leaped to the top of his brush pile and howled while Francis lay shivering below, whereupon he had determined to fortify the burrow, and, using the first ring of stones as a foundation, had begun to build a wall. The wall tilted inward as it grew; but since the enclosure was roughly an oval in shape, the stones in each new layer crowded against adjacent stones to prevent an inward collapse. Brother Francis now hoped that by a careful selection of rocks and a certain mount of juggling, dirt-tamping, and pebble-wedging, he would be able to complete a dome. And, a single span of unbuttressed arch, somehow defying gravity, stood there over the burrow as a token of this ambition. Brother Francis yelped like a puppy when the pilgrim rapped curiously at this arch with his staff. Solicitous for his abode, the novice had drawn nearer during the pilgrim’s inspection. The pilgrim answered his yelp with a flourish of the cudgel and a bloodthirsty howl. Brother Francis promptly tripped on the hem of his tunic and sat down. The old man chuckled. “Hmmm-hnnn! You’ll need a strange shape of a rock to fit that gap,” he said, and rattled his staff back and forth in a vacant space in the highest tier of stones. The youth nodded and looked away. He continued to sit in the sand, and, by silence and by his lowered gaze, he hoped to tell the old man that he was neither free to converse nor free to accept willingly another’s presence in his place of Lenten solitude. The novice began writing with a dry twig in the sand: Et ne nos inducas in…

“I’ve not offered to change these stones into bread for you yet, have I?” the old traveler said crossly. Brother Francis glanced up quickly. So! the old man could read, and read Scripture, at that. Furthermore, his remark implied that he had understood both the novice’s impulsive use of holy water and his reason for being here as well. Aware now that the pilgrim was teasing him, Brother Francis lowered his eyes again and waited. “Hmmm-hnnn! So you’re to be left alone, are you? Well, then, I’d best be on my way. Tell me, will your brothers at the abbey let an old man rest a bit in their shade?” Brother Francis nodded. “They’ll give you food and water too,” he added softly, in charity. The pilgrim chuckled. “For that, I’ll find you a rock to fit that gap before I go. God with you.” But you need not—The protest died unspoken. Brother Francis watched him hobbling slowly away. The pilgrim wandered in and about among the rubble mounds. He paused occasionally to inspect a stone or pry at one with his staff. His search would surely prove fruitless, the novice thought, for it was a repetition of a search which the youth himself had been making since mid-morning. He had decided at last that it would be easier to remove and rebuild a section of the highest tier than to find a keystone that approximated the hourglass shape of the gap in that tier. But, surely, the pilgrim would soon exhaust his patience and wander on his way. Meanwhile, Brother Francis rested. He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of his vigil demanded that he seek: a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be written in his solitude—if that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there. The Little Book, which Prior Cheroki had left with him on the preceding Sunday, served as a guide to his meditation. It was centuries old, and it was called Libellus Leibowitz, although only an uncertain tradition attributed its authorship to the Beatus himself. “Parum equidem te diligebam, Domine, juventute mea; quare doleo nimis…Too little, O Lord, did I love Thee in the time of my youth; wherefore I grieve exceedingly in the time of my age. In vain did I flee from Thee in those days…”

“Hoy! Over here!” came a shout from beyond the rubble mounds. Brother Francis glanced up briefly, but the pilgrim was not in sight. His eyes fell again to the page. “Repugnans tibi, ausus sum quaerere quidquid doctius mihi fide, certius spe, aut dulcius caritate visum esset. Quis itaque stultior me…” “Hey boy!” the cry came again. “I found you a stone, one likely to fit.” This time when Brother Francis looked up, he caught a glimpse of the pilgrim’s staff waving signals to him beyond the top of a rubble heap. Sighing the novice returned to his reading. “O inscrutabilis Scrutator animarum, cui patet omne cor, si me vocaveras, olim a te fugeram. Si autem nunc velis vocare me indignum…” And, irritably from beyond the rubble mound: “All right, then, suit yourself. I’ll mark the rock and set a stake by it. Try it or not, as you please.” “Thank you,” the novice sighed, but doubted that the old man heard him. He toiled on with the text: “Libera me, Domine, ab vitiis meis, ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim, et vocationis…” “There, then!” the pilgrim shouted. “It’s staked and marked. And may you find your voice soon, boy. Olla allay!” Soon after the last shout faded and died, Brother Francis caught a glimpse of the pilgrim trudging away on the trail that led toward the abbey. The novice whispered a swift blessing after him, and a prayer for safe wayfaring. His privacy having been restored, Brother Francis returned the book to his burrow and resumed his haphazard stonemasonry, not yet troubling himself to investigate the pilgrim’s find. While his starved body heaved, strained, and staggered under the weight of the rocks, his mind, machinelike kept repeating the prayer for the certainty of his vocation: “Libere me, Domine, ab vitiis meis…Set me free, O Lord, from my own vices, so that in my own heart I may be desirous of only Thy will, and be aware of Thy summons if it come…ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim, et vocatinonis tuae conscius si digneris me vocare. Amen. “Set me free, O Lord, from my own vices, so that in my own heart…”

A sky-herd of cumulus clouds, on their way to bestow moist blessings on the mountains after cruelly deceiving the parched desert, began blotting out the sun and trailing dark shadow-shapes across the blistered land below, offering intermittent but welcome respite from the searing sunlight. When a racing cloud-shadow wiped its way over the ruins, the novice worked rapidly until the shadow was gone, then rested until the next bundle of fleece blotted out the sun. It was quite by accident that Brother Francis finally discovered the pilgrim’s stone. While wandering thereabouts, he stumbled over the stake which the old man had driven into the ground as a marker. He found himself on his hands and knees staring at a pair of marks freshly chalked on an ancient stone: לצ The marks were so carefully drawn that Brother Francis immediately assumed them to be symbols, but minutes of musing over them left him still bemused. Witch markings perhaps? But no, the old man had called: “Godwith-you,” as a witch would not. The novice pried the stone free from the rubble and rolled it over. As he did so, the rock mound rumbled faintly from within; a small stone clattered down the slope. Francis danced away from a possible avalanche, but the disturbance was momentary. In the place where the pilgrim’s rock had been wedged, however, there now appeared a small black hole. Holes were often inhabited. But this hole seemed to have been so tightly corked by the pilgrim’s stone that scarcely a flea could have entered it before Francis had overturned the rock. Nevertheless, he found a stick and gingerly thrust it into the opening. The stick encountered no resistance. When he released it, the stick slid into the hole and vanished, as if into a larger underground cavity. He waited nervously. Nothing slithered forth. He sank to his knees again and cautiously sniffed at the hole. Having noticed neither an animal odor nor any hint of brimstone, he rolled a bit of gravel into it and leaned closer to listen. The gravel bounced once, a few feet below the opening, and then kept rattling its way downward, struck something metallic in passing, and finally came to rest somewhere far below. Echoes suggested an underground opening the size of a room. Brother Francis climbed unsteadily to his feet and looked around. He seemed alone, as usual, except for his companion buzzard which, soaring

on high, had been watching him with such interest lately that other buzzards occasionally left their territories near the horizons and came to investigate. The novice circled the rubble heap, but found no sign of a second hole. He climbed an adjacent heap and squinted down the trail. The pilgrim had long since vanished. Nothing moved along the old roadway, but he caught a fleeting glimpse of Brother Alfred crossing a low hill a mile to the east in search of firewood near his own Lenten hermitage. Brother Alfred was deaf as a post. There was no one else in view. Francis foresaw no reason whatever to scream for help, but to estimate in advance the probable results of such a scream, if the need should arise, seemed only an exercise of prudence. After a careful scrutiny of the terrain, he climbed down from the mound. Breath needed for screaming would be better used for running. He thought of replacing the pilgrim’s stone to cork the hole as before, but the adjacent stones had shifted slightly so that it no longer fit its previous place in the puzzle. Besides, the gap in the highest tier of his shelter wall remained unfilled, and the pilgrim was right: the stone’s size and shape suggested a probable fit. After only brief misgivings, he hoisted the rock and staggered back to his burrow. The stone slipped neatly into place. He tested the new wedge with a kick; the tier held fast, even though the jolt caused a minor collapse a few feet away. The pilgrim’s marks, though blurred by his handling of the stone, were still dear enough to be copied. Brother Francis carefully redrew them on another rock, using a charred stick as a stylus. When Prior Cheroki made his Sabbath tour of the hermitages, perhaps the priest would be able to say whether the marks had meaning, either as charm or curse. To fear the pagan cabals was forbidden, but the novice was curious at least to learn what sign would be overhanging his sleeping pit, in view of the weight of the masonry on which the sign was written. His labors continued through the heat of the afternoon. A corner of his mind kept reminding him of the hole—the interesting, and yet fearsome, little hole—and the way the rattle of gravel had caused faint echoes from somewhere below ground. He knew that the ruins all about him here were very old. He knew also, from tradition that the ruins had been gradually eroded into these anomalous heaps of stone by generations of monks and occasional strangers, men seeking a load of stone or looking for the bits of rusty steel which could be found by shattering the larger sections of

columns and slabs to extract the ancient strips of that metal, mysteriously planted in the rocks by men of an age almost forgotten to the world. This human erosion had all but obliterated the resemblance to buildings, which tradition ascribed to the ruins in an earlier period, although the abbey’s present master-builder still took pride in his ability to sense and to point out the vestige of a floor plan here and there. And there was still metal to be found, if anyone cared to break enough rock to find it. The abbey itself had been built of these stones. That several centuries of stonemasons might have left anything of interest still to be discovered in the ruins, Francis regarded as improbable fancy. And yet, he had never heard anyone mention buildings with basements or underground rooms. The master-builder, he recalled at last, had been quite specific in saying that the buildings at this site had had aspects of hasty construction, lacked deep foundations, and had rested for the most part on flat surface slabs. With his shelter approaching completion, Brother Francis ventured back to the hole and stood looking down at it; he was unable to put off the desertdweller’s conviction that wherever a place exists to hide from the sun, something is already hiding in it. Even if the hole was now uninhabited, something would certainly slither into it before tomorrow’s dawn. On the other hand, if something already lived in the hole, Francis thought it safer to make its acquaintance by day than by night. There seemed to be no tracks in the vicinity except his own, the pilgrim’s, and the tracks of the wolves. Making a quick decision, he began clearing rubble and sand away from the hole. After half an hour of this, the hole was no larger, but his conviction that it opened into a subterranean pit had become a certainty. Two small boulders, half buried, and adjoining the opening, were obviously jammed together by the force of too much mass crowding the mouth of a shaft; they seemed caught in a bottleneck. When he pried one stone toward the right, its neighbor rolled left, until no further motion was possible. The reverse effect occurred when he pried in the opposing direction, but he continued to jostle at the rock-jam. His lever spontaneously leaped from his grasp, delivered a glancing blow to the side of his head, and disappeared in a sudden cave-in. The sharp blow sent him reeling. A flying stone from the rockslide struck him in the back and he fell gasping, uncertain whether or not he was falling into the pit

until the instant his belly hit solid ground and he hugged it. The roar of the rockfall was deafening but brief. Blinded by dust, Francis lay gasping for breath and wondering whether he dared to move, so sharp was the pain in his back, Having recovered a little breath, he managed to get one hand inside his habit and groped for the place between his shoulders where a few crushed bones might be. The place felt rough, and it stung. His fingers came away damp and red. He moved, but groaned and lay quietly again. There was a soft beating of wings. Brother Francis glanced up in time to see the buzzard preparing to alight on a rubble heap a few yards away. The bird took wing again at once, but Francis imagined that it had eyed him with a sort of motherly concern in the manner of a worried hen. He rolled over quickly. A whole black heavenly host of them had gathered, and they circled at a curiously low altitude. Just skimming the mounds. They soared higher when he moved. Suddenly ignoring the possibility of chipped vertebrae or a crushed rib, the novice climbed shakily to his feet. Disappointed, the black sky-horde rode back to altitude on their invisible elevators of hot air, then disbanded and dispersed toward their remoter aerial vigils. Dark alternatives to the Paraclete whose coming he awaited, the birds seemed eager at times to descend in place of the Dove; their sporadic interest had been unnerving him of late, and he promptly decided, after some experimental shrugging, that the sharp rock had done no more than bruise and scrape. A dust column which had plumed up from the site of the cave-in was tapering away on the breeze. He hoped someone would see it from the abbey’s watchtowers and come to investigate. At his feet, a square opening yawned in the earth, where one flank of the mound had collapsed into the pit below. Stairs led downward, but only the top steps remained unburied by the avalanche which had paused for six centuries in mid-fall to await the assistance of Brother Francis before completing its roaring descent. On one wall of the stair well a half-buried sign remained legible. Mustering his modest command of pre-Deluge English, he whispered the words haltingly: FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER

Maximum Occupancy: 15 Provision limitations, single occupant: 180 days; divide by actual number of occupants. Upon entering shelter, see that First Hatch is securely locked and sealed, that the intruder shields are electrified to repel contaminated persons attempting entry, that the warning lights are ON outside the enclosure… The rest was buried, but the first word was enough for Francis. He had never seen a “Fallout,” and he hoped he’d never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends. He crossed himself and backed away from the hole. Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a Fallout, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his Baptism drove the fiend away. Brother Francis visualized a Fallout as half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge, and as halfincubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep, for, were not the monsters of the world still called “children of the Fallout”? That the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which descended upon Job was recorded fact, if not an article of creed. The novice stared at the sign in dismay. Its meaning was plain enough. He had unwittingly broken into the abode (deserted, he prayed) of not just one, but fifteen of the dreadful beings! He groped for his phial of holy water.

2 “A spiritu fornicationis, Domino, libera nos. From the lightning and the tempest, O Lord, deliver us. From the scourge of the earthquake, O Lord, deliver us. From plague, famine, and war, O Lord, deliver us. “From the place of ground zero, O Lord, deliver us. From the rain of the cobalt, O Lord, deliver us. From the rain of the strontium, O Lord, deliver us. From the fall of the cesium, O Lord, deliver us. “From the curse of the Fallout, O Lord, deliver us. From the begetting of monsters, O Lord, deliver us. From the curse of the Misborn, O Lord deliver us. A morte perpetua, Domine, libera nos.

“Peccatores, te rogamus, audi nos. That thou wouldst spare us, we beseech thee, hear us. That thou wouldst pardon us, we beseech thee, hear us. That thou wouldst bring us truly to penance, te rogamus, audi nos.” Snatches of such versicles from the Litany of the Saints came whispering on each panting breath as Brother Francis lowered himself gingerly into the stair well of the ancient Fallout Shelter, armed as he was only with holy water and an improvised torch lighted from the banked embers of last night’s fire. He had waited more than an hour for someone from the abbey to come investigate the dust plume. No one had come. To abandon his vocational vigil even briefly, unless seriously ill or unless ordered to return to the abbey, would be regarded as an ipso facto renunciation of his claim of a true vocation to life as a monk of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz. Brother Francis would have preferred death. He was faced, therefore, with the choice of investigating the fearsome pit before sunset, or of spending the night in his burrow in ignorance of whatever might lurk in the shelter and might reawaken to prowl in darkness. As a nocturnal hazard, the wolves already made trouble enough, and the wolves were merely creatures of flesh and blood. Creatures of less solid substance, he preferred to meet by the light of day; although, to be sure, scant daylight fell into the pit below, the sun now being low in the west. The debris which had crashed down into the shelter formed a hill with its crest near the head of the stairs, and there was only a narrow squeezeway between the rocks and the ceiling. He went through it feet first and found himself forced to continue feet first, because of the steepness of the slope. Thus confronting the Unknown face-to-backside, he groped for footholds in the loose heap of broken stone and gradually worked his way downward. Occasionally, when his torch flickered low, he paused to tilt its flame downward, letting the fire spread further along the wood; during such pauses, he tried to appraise the danger about him and below. These was little to be seen. He was in an underground room, but at least one third of its

volume was filled by the mound of debris that had fallen through the stair well. The cascade of stone had covered all the floor, crushed several pieces of furniture that he could see, and perhaps had completely buried others. He saw battered metal lockers leaning awry, waist-deep in rubble. At the far and of the room was a metal door, hinged to swing toward him, and tightly sealed by the avalanche. Still legible in flaking paint on the door were the stenciled letters: INNER HATCH SEALED ENVIRONMENT Evidently the room into which he was descending was only an antechamber. But whatever lay beyond INNER HATCH was sealed there by several tons of rock against the door. Its environment was SEALED indeed, unless it had another exit. Having made his way to the foot of the slope, and after assuring himself that the antechamber contained no obvious menace, the novice went cautiously to inspect the metal door at closer range by torchlight. Printed under the stenciled letters of INNER HATCH was a smaller rust-streaked sign: WARNING: This hatch must not be sealed before all personnel have been admitted, or before all steps of safety procedure prescribed by Technical Manual CD-Bu-83A have been accomplished. When Hatch is sealed, air within shelter will he pressurized 2.0 p.s.i. above ambient barometric level to minimize inward diffusion. Once sealed, the hatch will be automatically unlocked by the servomonitor system when, but not before, any of the following conditions prevail: (1) when the exterior radiation count falls below the danger level, (2) when the air and water repurification system fails, (3) when the food supply is exhausted, (4) when the internal power supply fails. See CD-Bu-83A for further instructions. Brother Francis found himself slightly confused by the Warning, but he intended to heed it by not touching the door at all The miraculous

contraptions of the ancients were not to be carelessly tampered with, as many a dead excavator-of-the-past had testified with his dying gasp. Brother Francis noticed that the debris which had been lying in the antechamber for centuries was darker in color and rougher in texture than the debris which had weathered under the desert sun and in the sandy wind before today’s cave-in. One could tell by a glance at the stones that Inner Hatch had been blocked not by today’s rockslide but by one more ancient than the abbey itself. If Fallout Shelter’s Sealed Environment contained a Fallout, the demon had obviously not opened Inner Hatch since the time of the Flame Deluge, before the Simplification. And, if it had been sealed beyond the metal door for so many centuries, there was small reason, Francis told himself, to fear that it might come bursting through the hatch before Holy Saturday. His torch burned low. Having found a splintered chair leg, he set it ablaze with his waning flame, then began gathering bits of broken furniture with which to build a dependable fire, meanwhile pondering the meaning of that ancient sign: FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER. As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie’s theological calculus. He built his fire on the slope of the rubble pile, where it could brighten the darker crannies of the antechamber. Then he went to explore whatever might remain uncovered by debris. The ruins above ground had been reduced to archaeological ambiguity by generations of scavengers, but this underground ruin had been touched by no hand but the hand of impersonal

disaster. The place seemed haunted by the presences of another age. A skull, lying among the rocks in a darker corner, still retained a gold tooth in its grin—clear evidence that the shelter had never been invaded by wanderers. The gold incisor flickered when the fire danced high. More than once in the desert had Brother Francis encountered, near some parched arroyo, a small heap of human bones, picked clean and whitening in the sun. He was not especially squeamish, and one expected such things. He was, therefore, not startled when he first noticed the skull in the corner of the antechamber, but the flicker of gold in its grin kept catching his eye while he pried at the doors (locked or stuck) of the rusty lockers and tugged at the drawers (also stuck) of a battered metal desk. The desk might prove to be a priceless find, if it contained documents or a small book or two that had survived the angry bonfires of the Age of Simplification. While he kept trying to open the drawers, the fire burned low; he fancied that the skull began emitting a faint glow of its own. Such a phenomenon was not especially uncommon, but in the gloomy crypt, Brother Francis found it somehow most disturbing. He gathered more wood for the fire, returned to jerk and tug at the desk, and tried to ignore the skull’s flickering grin. While a little wary yet of lurking Fallouts, Francis had sufficiently recovered from his initial fright to realize that the shelter, notably the desk and the lookers, might well be teeming with rich relics of an age which the world had, for the most part, deliberately chosen to forget. Providence had bestowed a blessing here. To find a bit of the past which had escaped both the bonfires and the looting scavengers was a rare stroke of luck these days. There was, however, always a risk involved. Monastic excavators, alert for ancient treasures, had been known to emerge from a hole in the ground, triumphantly carrying a strange cylindrical artifact, and then—while cleaning it or trying to ascertain its purpose—press the wrong button or twist the wrong knob, thereby ending the matter without benefit of clergy. Only eighty years ago the Venerable Boedullus had written with obvious delight to his Lord Abbot that his small expedition had uncovered the remains of, in his own words, “the site of an intercontinental launching pad, complete with several fascinating subterranean storage tanks.” No one at the abbey ever knew what the Venerable Boedullus meant by “intercontinental launching pad,” but the Lord Abbot who had reigned at that time sternly decreed that monastic antiquarians must; on pain of

excommunication, avoid such “pads” thenceforth. For his letter to the abbot was the last that anyone ever saw of the Venerable Boedullus, his party, his “launching pad” site, and the small village which had grown up over that site; an interesting lake now graced the landscape where the village had been, thanks to some shepherds who diverted the course of a creek and caused it to flow into the crater to store water for their flocks in time of drought. A traveler who had come from that direction about a decade ago reported excellent fishing in that lake, but the shepherds thereabouts regarded the fish as the souls of the departed villagers and excavators; they refused to fish there because of Bo’dollos, the giant catfish that brooded in the deep. “…nor shall any other excavation be initiated which does nor have as its primary purpose the augmentation of the Memorabilia,” the Lord Abbot’s decree had added—meaning that Brother Francis should search the shelter only for books and papers, not tampering with interesting hardware. The gold-capped tooth kept winking and glittering at the corner of his eye while Brother Francis heaved and strained at the desk drawers. The drawers refused to budge. He gave the desk a final kick and turned to glare impatiently at the skull: Why don’t you grin at something else for a change? The grin remained. The gold-toothed residuum lay with its head pillowed between a rock and a rusty metal box. Quitting the desk, the novice picked his way across the debris at last for a clever inspection of the mortal remains. Clearly, the person had died on the spot, struck down by the torrent of stones and half buried by the debris. Only the skull and the bones of one leg had not been covered. The femur was broken, the back of the skull was crushed. Brother Francis breathed a prayer for the departed, then very gently lifted the skull from its resting place and turned it around so that it grinned toward the wall. Then his eye fell on the rusty box. The box was shaped like a satchel and was obviously a carrying case of some kind. It might have served any number of purposes, but it had been rather badly battered by flying stones. Gingerly he worked it loose from the rubble and carried it closer to the fire. The lock seemed to be broken, but the lid had rusted shut. The box rattled when he shook it. It was not an obvious place to look for books or papers, but—obviously too—it was designed to be opened and closed, and might contain a scrap or two of

information for the Memorabilia. Nevertheless, remembering the fate of Brother Boedullus and others, he sprinkled it with holy water before attempting to pry it open, and he handled the ancient relic as reverently as was possible while battering at its rusty hinges with a stone. At last he broke the hinges, and the lid fell free. Small metal tidbits bounced from trays, spilled among the rocks, some of them falling irretrievably into crevices. But, in the bottom of the box in the space beneath the trays, he beheld—papers! After a quick prayer of thanksgiving, he regathered as many of the scattered tidbits as he could, and, after loosely replacing the lid, began climbing the hill of debris toward the stair well and the thin patch of sky, with the box hugged tightly under one arm. The sun was blinding after the darkness of the shelter. He scarcely bothered to notice that it was sinking dangerously low in the west, but began at once to search for a flat slab on which the contents of the box could be spread for examination without risk of losing anything in the sand. Minutes later, seated on a cracked foundation slab, he began removing the tidbits of metal and glass that filled the trays. Most of them were small tubular things with a wire whisker at each end of each tube. These, he had seen before. The abbey’s small museum had a few of them, of various size, shape and color. Once he had seen a shaman of the hill-pagan people wearing a string of them as a ceremonial necklace. The hill people thought of them as “parts of the body of the god”—of the fabled Machina analytica, hailed as the wisest of their gods. By swallowing one of them, a shaman could acquire “Infallibility,” they said. He certainly acquired Indisputability that way, among his own people—unless he swallowed one of the poison kind. The similar tidbits in the museum were connected together too—not in the form of a necklace, but as a complex and rather disorderly maze in the bottom of a small metal box, exhibited as: “Radio Chassis: Application Uncertain.” Inside the lid of the carrying case, a note had been glued; the glue had powdered, the ink had faded, and the paper was so darkened by rusty stains that even good handwriting would have been hard enough to read, but this was written in a hasty scrawl. He studied it intermittently while emptying the trays. It seemed to be English, of a sort, but half an hour passed before he deciphered most of the message:

CARL— Must grab plane for [undecipherable] in twenty minutes. For God’s sake, keep Em there till we know if we’re at war. Please! try to get her on the alternate list for the shelter. Can’t get her a seat my plane. Don’t tell her why I sent her over with this box of junk, but try to keep her there till we know [undecipherable] at worst, one of the alternates not show. I.E.L. P.S. I put the seal on the lock and put TOP SECRET on the lid just to keep Em from looking inside. First tool box I happened to grab. Shove it in my locker or something. The note seemed hasty gibberish to Brother Francis, who was at the moment too excited to concentrate on any single item more than the rest. After a final sneer at the note-writer’s hasty scrawl, he began the task of removing the tray-racks to get at the papers in the bottom of the box. The trays were mounted on a swinging linkage which was obviously meant to swing the trays out of the box in stair-step array, but the pins were rusted fast, and Francis found it necessary to pry them out with a short steel tool from one of the tray compartments. When Brother Francis had removed the last tray, he touched the papers reverently: only a handful of folded documents here, and yet a treasure; for they had escaped the angry flames of the Simplification, wherein even sacred writings had curled, blackened, and withered into smoke while ignorant mobs howled and hailed it a triumph. He handled the papers as one might handle holy things, shielding them from the wind with his habit, for all were brittle and cracked from age. There was a sheaf of rough sketches and diagrams. There were hand-scribbled notes, two large folded papers, and a small book entitled Memo. First he examined the jotted notes. They were scrawled by the same hand that had written the note glued to the lid, and the penmanship was no less abominable. Pound pastrami, said one note, can kraut, six bagels,— bring home for Emma. Another reminded: Remember—pick up Form 1040, Uncle Revenue. Another was only a column of figures with a circled total from which a second amount was subtracted and finally a percentage taken, followed by the word damn! Brother Francis checked the figures; he could

find no fault with the abominable penman’s arithmetic, at least, although he could deduce nothing about what the quantities might represent. Memo, he handled with special reverence, because its title was suggestive of “Memorabilia.” Before opening it, he crossed himself and murmured the Blessing of Texts. But the small book proved a disappointment. He had expected printed matter, but found only a handwritten list of names, places, numbers and dates. The dates ranged through the latter part of the fifth decade, and earlier part of the sixth decade, twentieth century. Again it was affirmed!—the contents of the shelter came from the twilight period of the Age of Enlightenment. An important discovery indeed. Of the larger folded papers, one was tightly rolled as well, and it began to fall apart when he tried to unroll it; he could make out the words RACING FORM, but nothing more. After returning it to the box for later restorative work, he turned to the second folded document; its creases were so brittle that he dared inspect only a little of it, by parting the folds slightly and peering between them. A diagram, it seemed, but—a diagram of white lines on dark paper! Again he felt the thrill of discovery. It was clearly a blueprint!—and there was not a single original blueprint left at the abbey, but only inked facsimiles of several such prints. The originals had faded long ago from overexposure to light. Never before had Francis seen an original, although he had seen enough hand-painted reproductions to recognize it as a blueprint, which, while stained and faded, remained legible after so many centuries because of the total darkness and low humidity in the shelter. He turned the document over—and felt brief fury. What idiot had desecrated the priceless paper? Someone had sketched absent-minded geometrical figures and childish cartoon faces all over the back. What thoughtless vandal— The anger passed after a moment’s reflection. At the time of the deed, blueprints had probably been as common as weeds, and the owner of the box the probable culprit. He shielded the print from the sun with his own shadow while trying to unfold it further. In the lower right-hand corner was a printed rectangle containing, in simple block letters, various titles, dates, “patent numbers,” reference numbers, and names. His eye traveled down the list until it encountered: “CIRCUIT DESIGN BY: Leibowitz, I. E.”

He closed his eyes tightly and shook his head until it seemed to rattle. Then he looked again. There it was, quite plainly: CIRCUIT DESIGN BY: Leibowitz, I. E. He flipped the paper over again. Among the geometric figures and childish sketches, clearly stamped in purple ink, was the form: The name was written in a clear feminine hand, not in the hasty scrawl of the other notes. He looked again at the initialed signature of the note in the lid of the box: I. E. L.—and again at “CIRCUIT DESIGN BY…” And the same initials appeared elsewhere throughout the notes. There had been argument, all highly conjectural, about whether the beatified founder of the Order, if finally canonized, should be addressed as Saint Isaac or as Saint Edward. Some even favored Saint Leibowitz as the proper address, since the Beatus had, until the present, been referred to by his surname. “Beate Leibowitz, ora pro me!” whispered Brother Francis. His hands were trembling so violently that they threatened to ruin the brittle documents. He had uncovered relics of the Saint.

Of course, New Rome had not yet proclaimed that Leibowitz was a saint, but Brother Francis was so convinced of it that he made bold to add: “Sancte Leibowitz, ora pro me!” Brother Francis wasted no idle logic in leaping to his immediate conclusion: he had just been granted a token of his vocation by Heaven itself. He had found what he had been sent into the desert to find, as Brother Francis saw it. He was called to be a professed monk of the Order. Forgetting his abbot’s stem warning against expecting a vocation to come in any spectacular or miraculous form the novice knelt in the sand to pray his thanks and to offer a few decades of the rosary for the intentions of the old pilgrim who had pointed out the rock leading to the shelter. May you find your Voice soon, boy, the wanderer had said. Not until now did the novice suspect that the pilgrim meant Voice with a capital V. “Ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim, et vocationis tuae conscius, si digneris me vocare…” It would be left to the abbot to think that his “voice” was speaking the language of circumstances and not the language of cause and effect. It would be left to the Promotor Fidei to think that “Leibowitz,” perhaps, was not an uncommon name before the Flame Deluge, and that I. E. could as easily represent “Ichabod Ebenezer” as “Isaac Edward.” For Francis, there was only one. From the distant abbey, three bell notes rang out across the desert, a pause, then the three notes were followed by nine. “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” the novice dutifully responded glancing up in surprise to see that the sun had become a fat scarlet ellipse that already touched the western horizon. The rock barrier around his burrow was not yet complete. As soon as the Angelus was said, he hastily repacked the papers in the rusty old box. A call from Heaven did not necessarily involve charismata for subduing wild beasts or befriending hungry wolves. By the time twilight had faded and the stars had appeared, his makeshift shelter was as well fortified as he could make it; whether it was wolf-proof remained to be tested. The test would not be long in coming. He had already heard a few howls from the west. His fire was rekindled, but there was no light left outside the circle of firelight to permit the gathering of his

dally collection of purple cactus fruit—his only source of nourishment except on Sundays, when a few handfuls of parched corn were sent from the abbey after a priest had made his rounds with the Holy Sacrament. The letter of the rule for a Lenten vocational vigil was not so strict as its practical application. As applied, the rule amounted to simple starvation. Tonight, however, the gnawing of hunger was less troublesome to Francis than his own impatient urge to run back to the abbey and announce the news of his discovery. To do so would be to renounce his vocation no sooner than it had come to him; he was here for the duration of Lent, vocation or no vocation, to continue his vigil as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. Dreamily, from near the fire, he gazed into the darkness in the direction of Fallout Survival Shelter and tried to visualize a towering basilica rising from the site. The fantasy was pleasant, but it was difficult to imagine anyone choosing this remote stretch of desert as the focal point of a future diocese. If not a basilica, then a smaller church—The Church of Saint Leibowitz of the Wilderness—surrounded by a garden and a wall, with a shrine of the Saint attracting rivers of pilgrims with girded loins out of the north. “Father” Francis of Utah conducted the pilgrims on a tour of the ruins, even through “Hatch Two” into the splendors of “Sealed Environment” beyond, the catacombs of the Flame Deluge where… where…well, afterwards, he would offer Mass for them on the altar stone which enclosed a relic of the church’s name-saint—a bit of burlap? fibers from the hangman’s noose? fingernail clippings from the bottom of the rusty box?—or perhaps RACING FORM. But the fantasy withered. The chances of Brother Francis becoming a priest were slight—not being a missionary Order, the Brothers of Leibowitz needed only enough priests for the abbey itself and a few smaller communities of monks in other locations. Furthermore, the “Saint” was still only a Beatus officially, and would never be formally declared a saint unless he wrought a few more good solid miracles to underwrite his own beatification, which was not an infallible proclamation, as canonization would be, although it permitted the monks of the Leibowitz Order formally to venerate their founder and patron, outside of the Mass and the Office. The proportions of the fantasy church dwindled to the size of a wayside shrine; the river of pilgrims shrank to a trickle. New Rome was busy with other matters, such as the petition for a formal

definition on the question of the Preternatural Gifts of the Holy Virgin, the Dominicans holding that the Immaculate Conception implied not only indwelling grace, but also that the Blessed Mother had had the preternatural powers which were Eve’s before the Fall; some theologians of other Orders, while admitting this to be pious conjecture, denied that it was necessarily the case, and contended that a “creature” might be “originally innocent” but not endowed with preternatural gifts. The Dominicans bowed to this, but contended that the belief had always been implicit in other dogma—such as the Assumption (preternatural immortality) and the Preservation from Actual Sin (implying preternatural integrity) and still other examples. While attempting to settle this dispute, New Rome had seemingly left the case for the canonization of Leibowitz to gather dust on the shelf. Contenting himself with a small shrine of the Beatus and a casual trickle of pilgrims, Brother Francis drowsed. When he awoke, the fire was reduced to glowing embers. Something seemed amiss. Was he quite alone? He blinked around at the encompassing darkness. From beyond the bed of reddish coals, the dark wolf blinked back. The novice yelped and dived for cover. The yelp, he decided as he lay trembling within his den of stones and brush, had been only an involuntary breach of the rule of silence. He lay hugging the metal box and praying that the days of Lent might pass swiftly, while padded feet scratched about his enclosure.

3 “…and then, Father, I almost took the bread and cheese.” “But you didn’t take it?” “No.” “Then there was no sin by deed.” “But I wanted it so badly, I could taste it.” “Willfully? Did you deliberately enjoy the fantasy?” “No.” “You tried to get rid of it.” “Yes.” “So there was not culpable gluttony of thought either. Why are you confessing this?” “Because then I lost my temper and splashed him with holy water.” “You what? Why?” Father Cheroki, wearing his stole, stared at the penitent who knelt in profile before him in the scorching sunlight on the open desert; the priest kept wondering how it was possible for such a youth (not particularly intelligent insofar as he could determine) to manage to find occasions or near-occasions of sin while completely isolated on barren desert, far from any distraction or apparent source of temptation. There should be very little trouble a boy could get into out here, armed as he was with only a rosary, a flint, a penknife, and a prayerbook. So it seemed to Father Cheroki. But this confession was taking up quite a lot of time; he wished the boy would get on with it. His arthritis was bothering him again, but because of the presence of the Holy Sacrament on the portable table which he took with him on his rounds, the priest preferred to stand, or to stay on his knees along with the penitent. He had lighted a candle before the small golden

case which contained the Hosts, but the flame was invisible in the sunglare, and the breeze might even have blown it out. “But exorcism is permissible these days, without any specific higher authorization. What are you confessing—being angry?” “That too.” “At whom did you become angry? At the old man—or at yourself for almost taking the food?” “I—I’m not sure.” “Well, make up your mind,” Father Cheroki said impatiently. “Either accuse yourself, or else not.” “I accuse myself.” “Of what?” Cheroki sighed. “Of abusing a sacramental in a fit of temper.” “‘Abusing’? You had no rational reason to suspect diabolic influence? You just became angry and squirted him with it? Like throwing the ink in his eye?” The novice squirmed and hesitated, sensing the priest’s sarcasm. Confession was always difficult for Brother Francis. He could never find the right words for his misdeeds, and in trying to remember his own motives, he became hopelessly confused. Nor was the priest helping matters by taking the “either-you-did-or-else-you-didn’t” stand—even though, obviously, either Francis had or else he hadn’t. “I think I lost my senses for a moment,” he said finally. Cheroki opened his mouth, apparently meaning to pursue the matter, then thought better of it. “I see. What next then?” “Gluttonous thoughts,” Francis said after a moment. The priest sighed. “I thought we were through with that. Or is this another time?” “Yesterday. There was this lizard, Father. It had blue and yellow stripes, and such magnificent hams—thick as your thumb and plump, and I kept thinking how it would taste like chicken, roasted all brown and crisp outside, and—” “All right,” the priest interrupted. Only a hint of revulsion crossed his aged face. After all, the boy was spending a lot of time in the sun. “You took pleasure in these thoughts? You didn’t try to get rid of the temptation?” Francis reddened. “I—I tried to catch it. It got away.”

“So, not merely thought—deed as well. Just that one time?” “Well—yes, just that.” “All right, in thought and deed, willfully meaning to eat meat during Lent. Please be as specific as you can after this. I thought you had examined your conscience properly. Is there anything else?” “Quite a lot.” The priest winced. He had several hermitages to visit; it was a long hot ride, and his knees were hurting. “Please get on with it as quickly as you can,” he sighed. “Impurity, once.” “Thought, word, or deed?” “Well, there was this succubus, and she—” “Succubus? Oh—nocturnal. You were asleep?” “Yes, but—” “Then why confess it?” “Because afterwards.” “Afterwards what? When you woke up?” “Yes. I kept thinking about her. Kept imagining it all over again.” “All right, concupiscent thought, deliberately entertained. You’re sorry? Now, what next?” All this was the usual sort of thing that one kept hearing time after endless time from postulant after postulant, novice after novice, and it seemed to Father Cheroki that the least Brother Francis could do would be to bark out his self-accusations one, two, three, in a neat orderly manner, without all this prodding and prompting. Francis seemed to find difficulty in formulating whatever he was about to say; the priest waited. “I think my vocation has come to me, Father, but—” Francis moistened his cracked lips and stared at a bug on a rock. “Oh, has it?” Cheroki’s voice was toneless. “Yes, I think—but would it be a sin, Father, if when I first got it, I thought rather scornfully of the handwriting? I mean?” Cheroki blinked. Handwriting? Vocation? What kind of a question was —He studied the novice’s serious expression for a few seconds, then frowned. “Have you and Brother Alfred been passing notes to each other?” he asked ominously.

“Oh, no, Father!” “Then whose handwriting are you talking about?” “The Blessed Leibowitz.” Cheroki paused to think. Did there, or did there not, exist in the abbey’s collection of ancient documents, any manuscript penned personally by the founder of the Order?—an original copy? After a moment’s reflection, he decided in the affirmative; yes, there were a few scraps of it left, carefully kept under lock and key. “Are you talking about something that happened back at the abbey? Before you came out here?” “No, Father. It happened right over there—” He nodded toward the left. “Three mounds over, near the tall cactus.” “Involving your vocation, you say?” “Y-yes, but—” “Of course,” Cheroki said sharply, “you could NOT POSSIBLY be trying to say that—you have received—from the Blessed Leibowitz, dead now, lo, the last six hundred years—a handwritten invitation to profess your solemn vows? And you, uh, deplored his handwriting?—Forgive me, but that’s the impression I was getting.” “Well, it’s something like that, Father.” Cheroki sputtered. Becoming alarmed, Brother Francis produced a scrap of paper from his sleeve and handed it to the priest. It was brittle with age and stained. The ink was faded. “Pound pastrami,” Father Cheroki pronounced, slurring over some of the unfamiliar words, “can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.” He stared fixedly at Brother Francis for several seconds “This was written by whom?” Francis told him. Cheroki thought it over. “It’s not possible for you to make a good confession while you’re in this condition. And it wouldn’t be proper for me to absolve you when you’re not in your right mind.” Seeing Francis wince, the priest touched him reassuringly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll talk it over after you’re better. I’ll hear your confession then. For the present—” He glanced nervously at the vessel containing the Eucharist. “I want you to gather up your things and return to the abbey at once.” “But, Father, I—”

“I command you,” the priest said tonelessly, “to return to the abbey at once.” “Y-yes, Father.” “Now, I’m not going to absolve you, but you might make good act of contrition and offer two decades of the rosary as penance anyhow. Would you like my blessing?” The novice nodded, fighting tears. The priest blessed him arose, genuflected before the Sacrament, recovered the golden vessel, and reattached it to the chain around his neck. Having pocketed the candle, collapsed the table, and strapped it in place behind the saddle, he gave Francis a last solemn nod, then mounted and rode away on his mare to complete his circuit of the Lenten hermitages. Francis sat in the hot sand and wept. It would have been simple if he could have taken the priest to the crypt to show him the ancient room, if he could have displayed the box and all its contents, and the mark the pilgrim had made on the rock. But the priest was carrying the Eucharist, and could not have been induced to climb down into a rock-filled basement on his hands and knees, or to paw though the contents of the old box and enter into archaeological discussions; Francis had known better than to ask. Cheroki’s visit was necessarily solemn, as long as the locket he was wearing contained a single Host; although, alter it was empty, he might be amenable to some informal listening. The novice could not blame Father Cheroki for leaping to the conclusion that he had gone out of his mind. He was a little groggy from the sun, and he had stammered quite a bit. More than one novice had turned up with addled wits after a vocational vigil. There was nothing to do but obey the command to return. He walked to the shelter and glanced into it once again, to reassure himself that it was really there; then he went to get the box. By the time he had it repacked and was ready to leave, the dust plume had appeared in the southeast, heralding the arrival of the supply carrier with water and corn from the abbey. Brother Francis decided to wait for his supplies before starting the long trek home. Three donkeys and one monk ambled into view at the head of the dust streamer. The lead donkey plodded under the weight of Brother Fingo. In spite of the hood, Francis recognized the cook’s helper from his hunched

shoulders and from the long hairy shins that dangled on either side of the donkey so that Brother Fingo’s sandals nearly dragged the ground. The animals that followed came loaded with small bags of corn and skins of water. “Sooooee pig-pig-pig! Sooee pig!” Fingo called, cupping his hands to his mouth and broadcasting the hog-call across the ruins as if he had not seen Francis waiting for him beside the trail. “Pig pig pig!—Oh, there you are, Francisco! I mistook you for a bone pile. Well, we’ll have to fatten you up for the wolves. There you are, help yourself to the Sunday slops. How goes the hermit trade? Think you’ll make it a career? Just one waterskin, mind you, and one sack of corn. And watch Malicia’s hind feet; she’s in rut and feels frolicky—kicked Alfred back there, crunch! right in the kneecap. Careful with it!” Brother Fingo brushed back his hood and chortled while the novice and Malicia fenced for position. Fingo was undoubtedly the ugliest man alive, and when he laughed, the vast display of pink gums and huge teeth of assorted colors added little in his charm; he was a sport, but the sport could scarcely be called monstrous; it was a rather common hereditary pattern in the Minnesota country from whence he came; it produced baldness and a very uneven distribution of melanin, so that the gangling monk’s hide was a patchwork of beef-liver and chocolate splashes on an albino background. However, his perpetual good humor so compensated for his appearance that one ceased to notice it after a few minutes; and after long acquaintance, Brother Fingo’s markings seemed as normal as those of a painted pony. What might have seemed hideous if he were a sulking fellow, managed almost to become as decorative as clown’s make-up when accompanied by exuberant good cheer. Fingo’s assignment to the kitchen was punitive and probably temporary. He was a woodcarver by trade, and normally worked in the carpenter’s shop. But some incident of self-assertion, in connection with a figure of the Blessed Leibowitz which he had been permitted to carve, had caused the abbot to order him transferred to the kitchen until he showed some signs of practicing humility. Meanwhile, the figure of the Beatus waited in the carpentry shop, halfcarved. Fingo’s grin began to fade as he studied Francis’ countenance while the novice unloaded his grain and water from the frisky she-ass. “You look like

a sick sheep, boy,” he said to the penitent. “What’s the trouble? Is Father Cheroki in one of his slow rages again?” Brother Francis shook his head. “Not that I could tell.” “Then what’s wrong? Are you really sick?” “He ordered me back to the abbey.” “Wha-a-at?” Fingo swung a hairy shin over the jackass and dropped a few inches to the ground. He towered over Brother Francis, clapped a meaty hand on his shoulder, and peered down into his face. “What is it; the jaundice?” “No. He thinks I’m—” Francis tapped his temple and shrugged. Fingo laughed. “Well, that’s true, but we all knew that. Why is he sending you back?” Francis glanced down at the box near his feet. “I found some things that belonged to the Blessed Leibowitz. I started to tell him, but he didn’t believe me. He wouldn’t let me explain. He—” “You found what?” Fingo smiled his disbelief, then dropped to his knees and opened the box while the novice watched nervously. The monk stirred the whiskered cylinders in the trays with one finger and whistled softly. “Hill-pagan charms, aren’t they? This is old, Francisco, this is really old.” He glanced at the note in the lid. “What’s this gibberish?” he asked, squinting up at the unhappy novice. “Pre-Deluge English.” “I never studied it, except what we sing in choir.” “It was written by the Beatus himself.” “This?” Brother Fingo stared from the note to Brother Francis and back to the note. He shook his head suddenly, clamped the lid back on the box, and stood up. His grin had become artificial. “Maybe Father’s right. You better hike back and have Brother Pharmacist brew you up one of his toadstool specials. That’s the fever, Brother.” Francis shrugged, “Perhaps.” “Where did you find this stuff?” The novice pointed. “Over that way a few mounds. I moved some rocks. There was a cave-in, and I found a basement. Go see for yourself.” Fingo shook his head. “I’ve got a long ride ahead.” Francis picked up the box and started toward the abbey while Fingo returned to his donkey, but after a few paces the novice stopped and called

back. “Brother Spots—could you take two minutes?” “Maybe,” answered Fingo; “What for?” “Just walk over there and look in the hole.” “Why?” “So you can tell Father Cheroki if it’s really there.” Fingo paused with one leg half across his donkey’s back. “Ha!” He withdrew the leg. “All right. If it’s not there, I’ll tell you.” Francis watched for a moment while the gangling Fingo strode out of sight among the mounds; then he turned to shuffle down the long dusty trail toward the abbey, intermittently munching corn and sipping from the waterskin. Occasionally he glanced back. Fingo was gone much longer than two minutes. Brother Francis had ceased to watch for his reappearance by the time he heard a distant bellow from the ruins far behind him. He turned. He could make out the distant figure of the woodcarver standing atop one of the mounds. Fingo was waving his arms and vigorously nodding his head in affirmation. Francis waved back, then hiked wearily on his way. Two weeks of near-starvation had exacted their tribute. After two or three miles he began to stagger. When still nearly a mile from the abbey, he fainted beside the road. It was late afternoon before Cheroki, riding back from his rounds, noticed him lying there, hastily dismounted, and bathed the youth’s face until he gradually brought him around. Cheroki had encountered the supply donkeys on his way back and had paused to hear Fingo’s account, confirming Brother Francis’ find. Although he was not prepared to believe that Francis had discovered anything of real importance, the priest regretted his earlier impatience with the boy. Having noticed the box lying nearby with its contents half-spilled in the road, and having glanced briefly at the note in the lid, while Francis sat groggy and confused at the edge of the trail, Cheroki found himself willing to regard the boy’s earlier babblings as the result of romantic imagination rather than of madness or delirium. He had neither visited the crypt nor closely examined the contents of the box, but it was obvious, at least, that the boy had been misinterpreting real events rather than confessing hallucinations. “You can finish your confession as soon as we get back,” he told the novice softly, helping him to climb up behind the saddle on the mare. “I

think I can absolve you if you don’t insist on personal messages from the saints. Eh?” Brother Francis was too weak at the moment to insist on anything.

4 “You did the right thing,” the abbot grunted at last. He had been slowly pacing the floor of his study for perhaps five minutes, his wide peasant face wearing a thick-furrowed muscular glower, while Father Cheroki sat nervously on the edge of his chair. Neither priest had spoken since Cheroki had entered the room in answer to his ruler’s summons; Cheroki jumped slightly when Abbot Arkos finally grunted out the words. “You did the right thing,” the abbot said again, stopping in the center of the room and squinting at his prior, who finally began to relax It was nearly midnight and Arkos had been preparing to retire for an hour or two of sleep before Matins and Lauds. Still damp and disheveled from a recent plunge in the bathing barrel, he reminded Cheroki of a were-bear only incompletely changed into a man. He was wearing a coyote-skin robe, and the only hint of his office was the pectoral cross that nestled in the black fur on his chest and flashed with candlelight whenever he turned toward the desk. His wet hair hung over his forehead, and with his short jutting beard and his coyote skins, he looked, at the moment, less like a priest than a military chieftain, full of restrained battle-anger from a recent assault. Father Cheroki, who came of baronial stock from Denver, tended to react formally to men’s official capacities, tended to speak courteously to the badge of office while not allowing himself to see the man who wore it, in this respect following the Court customs of many ages. Thus Father Cheroki had always maintained a formally cordial relationship with the ring and the pectoral cross, with the office, of his abbot, but permitted himself to see as little as possible of Arkos the man. This was rather difficult under present circumstances, the Reverend Father Abbot being fresh out of his bath, and padding around his study in his bare feet. He had apparently just trimmed a

corn and cut too deep; one great toe was bloody. Cheroki tried to avoid noticing it, but felt very ill at ease. “You do know what I’m talking about?” Arkos growled impatiently. Cheroki hesitated. “Would you mind, Father Abbot, being specific—in case it’s connected with something I might have heard about only in confession?” “Hah? Oh! Well, I’m bedeviled! You did hear his confession. I clean forgot. Well, get him to tell you again, so you can talk—though Heaven knows, it’s all over the abbey anyhow. No, don’t go see him now. I’ll tell you, and don’t answer on whatever’s sealed. You’ve seen that stuff?” Abbot Arkos waved toward his desk where the contents of Brother Francis’ box had been emptied for examination. Cheroki nodded slowly. “He dropped it beside the road when he fell. I helped gather it up, but I didn’t look at it carefully.” “Well, you know what he claims it is?” Father Cheroki glanced aside. He seemed not to hear the question. “All right, all right,” the abbot growled, “never mind what he claims it is. Just go look it over carefully yourself and decide what you think it is.” Cheroki went to bend over the desk and scrutinize the papers carefully, one at a time, while the abbot paced and kept talking, seemingly to the priest but half to himself. “It’s impossible! You did the right thing to send him back before he uncovered more. But of course that’s not the worst part. The worst part is the old man he babbles about. It’s getting too thick. I don’t know anything that could damage the case worse than a whole flood of improbable ‘miracles.’ A few real incidents, certainly! It has to be established that the intercession of the Beatus has brought about the miraculous—before canonization can occur. But there can be too much! Look at the Blessed Chang—beatified two centuries ago, but never canonized—so far. And why? His Order got too eager, that’s why. Every time somebody got over a cough, it was a miraculous cure by the Beatus. Visions in the basement, evocations in the belfry; It sounded more like a collection of ghost stories than a list of miraculous incidents. Maybe two or three incidents were really valid, but when there’s that much chaff—well?” Father Cheroki looked up. His knuckles had whitened on the edge of the desk and his face seemed strained. He seemed not to have been listening. “I

beg your pardon, Father Abbot?” “Well, the same thing could happen here, that’s what,” said the abbot, and resumed his slow padding to and fro. “Last year there was Brother Noyon and his miraculous hangman’s noose. Ha! And the year before that, Brother Smirnov gets mysteriously cured of the gout—how?—by touching a probable relic of our Blessed Leibowitz, the young louts say. And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim—wearing what?—wearing for a kilt the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same—” He paused, looking at Cheroki. “I can tell by your blank look that you haven’t heard this yet? No? All right, so you can’t say. No, no, Francis didn’t say that. All he said was—” Abbot Arkos tried to inject a slightly falsetto quality into his normally gruff voice. “All Brother Francis said was —‘I met a little old man, and I thought he was a pilgrim heading for the abbey because he was going that way, and he was wearing an old burlap sack tied around with a piece of rope. And he made a mark on the rock, and the mark looked like this.’” Arkos produced a scrap of parchment from the pocket of his fur robe and held it up toward Cheroki’s face in the candle-glow. Still trying, with only slight success, to imitate Brother Francis: “‘And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Do you know?’” Cheroki stared at the symbols לצ and shook his head. “I wasn’t asking you,” Arkos gruffed in his normal voice. “That’s what Francis said. I didn’t know either.” “You do now?” “I do now. Somebody looked it up. That is a lamedh, and that is a sadhe. Hebrew letters.” “Sadhe lamedh?” “No. Right to left. Lamedh sadhe. An ell, and a tee-ess sound. If it had vowel marks, it might be ‘loots,’ ‘lots,’ ‘lets,’ ‘lets,’ ‘latz,’ `litz’—anything like that. If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like Lllll —guess-who.” “Leibo—Ho, no!” “Ho, yes! Brother Francis didn’t think of it. Somebody else thought of it. Brother Francis didn’t think of the burlap hood and the hangman’s rope; one of his chums did. So what happens? By tonight, the whole novitiate is

buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and the Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he’d find his vocation.” A perplexed frown crossed Cheroki’s face. “Did Brother Francis say that?” “NOO!” Arkos roared. “Haven’t you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then I’d HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly, in fact, and lets the others read in the meanings. I haven’t talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story.” “I think I’d better talk to Brother Francis,” Cheroki murmured. “Do! When you first came in, I was still wondering whether to roast you alive or not. For sending him in, I mean. If you had let him stay out there on the desert, we wouldn’t have this fantastic twaddle going around. But, on the other hand, if he’d stayed out there, there’s no telling what else he might have dug out of that cellar. I think you did the right thing, to send him in.” Cheroki, who had made the decision on no such basis, found silence to be the appropriate policy. “See him,” growled the abbot. “Then send him to me.” It was about nine on a bright Monday morning when Brother Francis rapped timidly at the door of the abbot’s study. A good night’s sleep on the hard straw pallet in his old familiar cell, plus a small bite of unfamiliar breakfast, had not perhaps done any wonders for starved tissue or entirely cleared the sun-daze from his brain, but these relative luxuries had at least restored him to sufficient clarity of mind to perceive that he had cause to be afraid. He was, in fact, terrified, so that his first tap at the abbot’s door went unheard. Not even Francis could hear it. After several minutes, he mustered the courage to knock again. “Benedicamus Domino.” “Deo? gratias?” asked Francis. “Come in, my boy, come in!” called an affable voice, which, after some seconds of puzzling, he recognized with amazement to have been that of his sovereign abbot. “You twist the little knob, my son,” said the same friendly voice after Brother Francis had stood frozen on the spot for some seconds, with his